Why I Love Childish Gambino

My musical love letter to Donald Glover.

This is the first installment of my music-centric series called Why I Love, where I’ll take an in-depth look at an artist I love and attempt to unpack the role that artist has played in my life and what their music means to me. Maybe by the end, you’ll feel inclined to check out the artist, too — which is great because there’s a Spotify playlist of all their need-to-know songs at the end of this article. Thanks for reading and listening, enjoy!

It’s 2012 and my high school boyfriend just handed me the CD he burned for me with all of his favorite songs. There’s a Sharpied-on tracklist written in his artsy handwriting around the silver disc. We’re sitting in my burnt orange Volkswagen bug in the high school parking lot when I hit play on it for the first time.

"Heartbeat” — the sixth track on Childish Gambino’s debut studio album, Camp — is the first song to come on. I don’t even remember the other songs. It sounds cliche, but it’s true — from the first listen, I was hooked. I replayed “Heartbeat” easily a hundred times that year, both alone and with the boyfriend, allowing the song’s rhythm to become a sort of metronome for that time in my life.

~

A year or so later, Because the Internet was released.

I hear him before I see him when that same boyfriend pulls into my parent’s driveway with his windows down, the bass thumping in the car and the music spilling out of the windows. All we did that year was drive around and listen to that album. Whether we were zooming down the backroads in McDonough or sitting in traffic in Atlanta, the volume would be as high as it could go and we’d be singing all the words at each other, laughing and yelling and trying our best to rap the lyrics on beat while still kissing at the stop lights. It was the best type of relationship in that way.

The explosiveness of the album matched the footsteps of my own emotions at this high school age. Being able to yell alongside Childish Gambino eased the pressure at least slightly; it felt as thought my feelings were being echoed through his music.

By our third summer together, we knew more than just the big hits. We found Childish’s older stuff — like I Am Just a Rapper and I Am Just A Rapper 2. We watched Donald Glover’s stand-up for a date night and we watched Community from the couch while eating homemade tamales when we were hungover on the weekends.

*It’s worth noting here that I’ve since discovered the accompanying screenplay that goes along with this album. Donald Glover truly does not rest. I can’t go into it in detail here, but I’d love to talk further about this if any of you readers feel so inclined.

~

In 2014, Childish Gambino dropped the Kauai album and the STN MTN mixtape. Without pre-meditating it, we had a special hike planned for Stone Mountain the weekend after the mixtape dropped.

We listened in the car on the way there while choking down mushrooms and blue Powerade. We packed our snacks in our bookbags and made sure we had water and weed before starting off on our journey. About halfway through the hike, the intensity began to build. I tried to play it cool but I worried I wouldn’t make it to the top — having never experienced these feelings, I wasn’t sure if these sensations were normal. Passersby encouraged me — Just wait ‘til you’re there, the view is amazing, you’re gonna be so glad you did it. A sweet pep talk and a handful of goldfish turned out to be all I needed and I was back on my feet. We climbed the rest of the way up the mountain while holding hands and giggling to ourselves.

When we got to the top physically, we got to the top spiritually as well. I realized they were right — of course it was worth it. We sat in a tree that somehow grew from the rock and watched the yellows and oranges and reds of the leaves ahead of us put on a performance for us alone. We described the patterns we saw and the ideas we were having to each other, trying to keep up with the rush of creativity in our heads. At one point, while skipping across the rocks like kids, we came up with a song that we were sure was incredible. Magically, we already knew the lyrics the next person would contribute though we couldn’t trace back where, if ever, we’d heard the song before.

Hours passed and we arrived back at the car, depleted yet still laughing and floating an inch above the ground. When he put the key in the ignition, that’s when we heard it. The song. The song we’d been singing all the way down the mountain, the song we swore we’d made up, the song we’d poured our heart into all afternoon — it was called “Retro (Rough),” from the Kauai album.

It was the best first trip, ever.

~

By 2016 when “Awaken, My Love!” came out, I was in a different relationship. Heartbreakingly, this new boyfriend didn’t share my love for Childish Gambino. He entertained it, sure, but I could feel the air tense up when I played the songs in the car and thus it became more enjoyable to listen to him alone. There was not much singing in the car and only sometimes were there kisses at stop lights. (Looking back, this really should’ve been my first sign. Hindsight’s 20/20.)

Still, I listened and enjoyed it and tried to force it on my college friends instead. These were college friends who, it should be noted, tended to lean more toward heavy metal than hip-hop or R&B or indie alternative or any other genre I could classify Childish in.

At one point, I found myself at a way-too-nice beach house in South Carolina with a group of these friends. We were sitting around a fire, drinking beer and passing around a phone to queue up songs to play from the speaker in the corner. I remember thinking twice about my music selections. I didn’t have any metal songs to contribute.

The first go-round, I picked “Redbone,” from his latest album. On my second pick, unable to think of another artist, I selected a track from the Camp album — it might’ve been “Backpackers” or “You See Me,” I don’t remember. I thought it would be different enough from my previous pick, yet maybe surprising in a good way that it was actually the same artist. My anxiety was already at a high for reasons we don’t need to unpack here.

When the song came on, there was an instant reaction. The person I knew the least, the owner of the house we were all in, said something under his breath in that snotty know-it-all way that the most anxious part of me had predicted. He said something like, “wow, another Childish Gambino song.”

I had just the right concoction in me for that comment to tip me over the edge. The anxiety attack grabbed the steering wheel. I got up and ran to the bathroom, wanting to bury myself in a special part of the earth that might appreciate my sensitive soul and my music taste. That boyfriend followed after me and found me standing in the shower crying over the songs I’d picked. He tried to console me but I could feel the judgment.

“Why did you pick it if you feel bad about it?” He asked. He’d picked all these metal songs I’d never heard him play before. He’d never even talked about them. I didn’t know how to tell him that I felt alienated. I couldn’t respond. He said, “I mean, there are other artists…”

Through tears and snot and sweat and spit I looked at him earnestly and asked, “But have you even heard his new album?”

~

“This Is America,” one of Childish Gambino’s most successful singles, was released in 2018.

I listened to this one alone. I watched the music video alone. I cried about it alone.

I was in the midst of going to school for journalism at the University of Georgia when the song was released. The oppressive loneliness of reading bad news every day was already starting to get to me and I wasn’t even technically in my career yet. With just one song and a powerful music video, once again, I felt understood. I felt like someone was right there with me in the experience, both of us baffled to be alive in such a violent time.

~

The next album to be released was 3.15.20. For five days only, the album was available on all streaming services.

The research I’ve done tells me that Childish Gambino released it unmixed, unmastered, without titles and without cover art because he believed the world was going to end. It’s title at the time was a nod to the day the Covid-19 pandemic was announced.

I remember getting the notification about the album while I was driving back to my grandmother’s house, which is where I was living during the initial pandemic times. I, like many others in the world, was not in a good place at this time in my life. My family was in and out of the hospital at the time and had been for three months by March. The word “exhausted” doesn’t even do it justice.

After helping my grandmother get to bed that night, I sat on her back porch by myself with a joint as the album played and I did my best to listen. I could barely hear it through all my worries and stresses. I replayed it over and over and over again over the following weeks, concentrating hard on that undeniable sense of vulnerability that is a trademark of many of his songs.

3.15.20 has since been remade, renamed, remastered, etc. It was re-released as Atavista earlier this year.

Listening to this album in 2020, I was given words for a loss I was feeling at a time when I didn’t even know how to look my grief in the eye. I didn’t listen to music in the same way during 2020 as I normally would — the songs didn’t resonate quite the same because the part of me for them to resonate with was busy doing other things.

When someone told me recently that “atavistic” means to revert to something ancient or ancestral, to go back to a previous form. The album is already reflecting on Glover’s life thus far, but to take it a step further and reflect on the ancestors’ lives is an element we don’t see often. In 2020 when it was first released, all I could think about was my elders, all of them immunocompromised and scared. This album reminded me that it’s okay that I’m scared, too.

I should note here that I really love Glover’s energy with the release of this original album. This idea of needing to put something, anything, out into the world before it ends is a feeling I recognize in myself. (It’s sort of why I’m here, on Substack, writing stuff like this).

~

Childish Gambino’s final album came out last Friday.

I watched the Donald Glover Hot Ones episode on YouTube the night before the album dropped. I knew the album was coming soon and I’d heard “Lithonia” but I wasn’t sure on the date. The next morning, the album was released. Glover was wearing the same outfit during the interview as he does on the album cover and in the trailer for the related motion picture.

I listened to the album a few times in a few different ways — off of my laptop while tidying up my apartment and getting sidetracked by a million things (the worst way); in the car while running late to an appointment (not an ideal way); and on my over-the-ear headphones while on a walk by myself (the best way).

Bando Stone and the New World is unlike anything Donald Glover has released before under the pseudonym, which somehow makes it even more par for the course for the talented musician.

The album is full of rock ballads and progressive funk and nods to hip-hop and every other genre that Childish Gambino has dipped his toes into over the years. There’s a film coming soon, but a release date hasn’t been shared. It’s fitting that the last album is one that ties in a film that allows Glover and Gambino to work together to tell the post-apocalyptic story that’s been years in the making.

-

I’ve read countless interviews from Donald Glover about what Childish Gambino is and why the pseudonym was created. Glover always says the same thing — that he was a kid who “really wanted a home.” He’s opened up about his experience of growing up alone, not just as the only Black boy in a sea of white people, but as the only person experiencing the world in the way he does.

I think this is what makes his music feel so unique to him. Every song is so authentically and intrinsically him. To me, those first tracks I ever listened to felt like the epitome of putting yourself out there and going for it. It’s been more than ten years and he’s still doing things that no other artist is doing. He’s not just putting something out into the world to have it exist, but he’s putting it out there in a way of verifying that he himself exists.

Things have changed since the beginning, of course. He’s gotten more famous, he’s become a father, the world has continued to spin despite the corruption and violence that keeps us all awake at night from time to time.

Truthfully, I don’t know Donald Glover as well as I know Childish Gambino. I appreciate his candor, his authenticity, his wit, his clever lines, his intelligence, his urgency to take things one step further. But most of all, I appreciate Donald Glover for letting Childish Gambino exist. I think that the musical personna worked as a vessel in allowing him to express parts of himself that maybe didn’t fit into other mediums. Music is good like that — you can put your whole soul into a song and then dress it up with some chords and melodies to make it feel less exposing.

Above all, he puts it all out there. He feels things deeply and intimately and he doesn’t stop there. He wants us, the listeners, to feel it too.

*This playlist is organized based on original album release date. It includes my favorite songs from every album.

Research/References/Additional Reading & Listening:

• https://www.youtube.com/@derrickcomedy — This is Donald Glover’s first “intro to fame.” It’s unfortunate that I didn’t discover his comedic YouTube videos earlier, but watching them now, knowing who he is today, brings me that much more joy. Watch next time you’re having a weird day.

• The first mixtape ever released by Childish Gambino - The Younger I Get, released in 2005

• YouTube — the Culdesac mixtape

• The PDF version of the 73-page Because the Internet screenplay that accompanies the album

• ForeverChildish — ‘the official Childish Gambino fansite’

• SoundCloud — the full STN MTN/Kauai mixtape

• This Reddit thread about the STN MTN/Kauai mixtape (there was a lot of uproar when the STN MTN songs were no longer easily available)

• This NYT article about Glover’s longtime creative collaborator, Ludwig Goransson, without whom all of these things I’ve written about would not have been possible in this way.

• The r/donaldglover Reddit page

• The Wikipedia page for Swarm, a comedy horror miniseries that Donald Glover created with Janine Nabers. (Adding this to my Watch Soon list!)

• ‘Why Donald Glover is Saying Goodbye to Childish Gambino’ - The New York Times

• Gilga - Glover’s new production company